Читать книгу The Great Gould - Peter Goddard - Страница 9

Altered Egos

April 1, 1951, 8:00 p.m. EST

Max Ferguson (the announcer): We hope you enjoy Startime!

Orchestra: THEME UP FULL … FADE … HOLD

Ferguson: Every Sunday evening, the trans-Canada network of the CBC brings you Startime … an hour of entertainment especially designed to please the families of Canada …

Orchestra: THEME UP FULL AND OUT

Ferguson: Tonight Paul Scherman conducts the Startime orchestra and chorus … and our guests are the brilliant young soprano Lois Marshall … the European tenor Joseph Reiner … popular singer Norma Locke … and pianist Glenn Gould. And, as usual, the man who tells you all about the stars and the music is your Startime host, Frank Willis.

Willis: Although Glenn Gould is only eighteen — a fifth-form student at high school — he’s considered one of Canada’s most accomplished concert pianists.... Now, with the Startime orchestra, Glenn Gould plays the third movement — Rondo — from Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto.

Each Gould narrative has its own location. The kid genius is always associated with the cottage, the brilliant piano whiz kid with New York, a city he came to loathe. But Gould the media star will also be associated with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Gould grew up as the CBC grew up, a factor perhaps encouraging in him a greater sense of belonging to the broadcaster. Canada first gave licences for private radio stations in 1922, only to see many of the stations simply rebroadcast American content. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was founded in 1936 and mandated to develop programming that was distinctly Canadian, a process accelerated in 1943 with the hiring of Andrew Allan as its new Supervisor of Drama.

Drama? Theatre? This while the Corporation had drama enough as part of its Second World War duties of reporting from the front and producing “plucky-us” documentaries?

A Scottish-born actor, director, and sometime radio announcer, Allan could best be described as something of a practical dandy, a charmer at cocktail parties, stylish, urbane, and a good drinker, but with a quiet resolve to make things happen the way he felt they should happen.

He’d already cultivated connections in New York and London, and was close to major Broadway stars such as Judith Evelyn, formerly of Winnipeg and Hollywood. But in following the CBC brass’s wishes to create “definitive” Canadian drama, Allan determinedly surrounded himself with a circle of Canadian writers who would go on to shape the CBC and Canadian culture for decades to come. Fletcher Markle, for one, remained a familiar name to anyone listening to the CBC for the thirty or so years after his 29:40 was first aired on January 23, 1944. This “dramatic essay” by Markle — in fact a radio play about being a radio play — initiated Allan’s Stage 44, the radio drama series that was to last twelve years, deep into the TV era. Then there was the polymath Lister Sinclair, and Len Peterson, whose prolific and provocative drama for Stage 44, They’re All Afraid, rankled CBC brass no end with its gloomy contradiction of the CBC’s aggressively affirmative approach to depicting Canada at war. (The row following the broadcasting of another Peterson play, The Man with a Bucket of Ashes, came close to getting Allan sacked.)

Allan later wrote in his autobiography: “My idea of being ‘defin­itive’ (which I had been told it must be) was to give writers their head, to let them write what they wanted and in the way they wanted to write it. The subtitle on the early Stages was a ‘report of the state of radio writing in Canada.’”

However much Ottawa’s bureaucrats messed around with it, the CBC always managed to incubate great talent. In recent decades much of that talent — say, Lorne Michaels, who created NBC’s Saturday Night Live from ideas begun and actors met at CBC — has found little future there. Those in Allan’s generation — which includes the actor Frank Willis, writers W.O. Mitchell and Harry J. Boyle, and composer Lucio Agostini — became familiar names to Canadians beyond their CBC work and well into the seventies and eighties.

Years later, when talking to John Jessop for The Canadian Music Book (1971), Gould said that the Sunday Night Stage broadcasts were likely the springboard for his own approach to radio. “I was fascinated with radio. A lot of that kind of ostensibly theatrical radio was also, in a very good sense, documentary making of a rather high order. At any rate, the distinctions between drama and documentary were quite often, it seemed to me, happily and successfully set aside.” Toronto’s theatre scene wasn’t particularly abundant, he added, “and being of sufficiently puritan temperament to be disinclined to theatre, even if there had been much of it, I was fascinated with radio theatre because it seemed to me somehow more pure, more abstract, and, in a certain sense, it had a reality for me that, later on, when I became familiar with conventional theatre, that kind of theatre always seemed to lack.” He continues: “In the late fifties, I began to write scripts for documentaries occasionally: and I was always dissatisfied with the kind of documentaries that radio seemed to decree. You know, they very often came out sounding — not square, because that’s not necessarily a pejorative word in my vocabulary, but they came out sounding — okay, I’ll borrow Marshall McLuhan’s term — linear. They came out sounding, ‘Over to you, now back to our host, and here for the wrap up is’ — in a word, predicable.”

Gould follows through with this thought, elsewhere, in his “The Idea of North: An Introduction,” writing: “… North, which, though technically a documentary, is at the very least a documentary which thinks of itself as a drama.”

Gould’s early radio work — and eventually his radio and TV work — was ubiquitous in Canada to the point where many Canadians might well have believed that broadcasting represented his real career, particularly if they were unable to see him live in concert. In fact, piano playing was Gould’s reality. Broadcasting was his desire. Before he made his debut recording in 1953 (on Hallmark, a small boutique Toronto recording outfit), Gould had appeared on CBC Radio’s Sunday Morning Recital on December 4, 1950, playing Mozart and Hindemith sonatas. The acetate tape of the performance given to him as a souvenir of the occasion became a memento he’d retrieve over the years from a shelf in his apartment to remember “that moment in my life when I first had a vague impression of the direction it would take.” He increasingly became a fixture at the CBC, with at least two recordings in 1951 and four more in 1952 — one featuring work by Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg — the same year he made his high-profile TV debut (on September 8), one of the select performers invited to celebrate the on-air opening of CBLT, the CBC’s Toronto station.

A good many tapes in the CBC archives are without dates. One recording in 1953 — one there’s a annotation for, that is — is followed by five more in 1954, three as part of the Distinguished Artist Series, then three more in 1955, and so on through the following years, the programs leaning to Bach keyboard work and Beethoven concertos. One CBC archivist told me years ago that there are “probably others things lurking out there, tapes without his name on, we don’t know of.”

Gould’s concert career was heating up over the same period, increas­ing from fourteen performances in 1955 to twenty-three in 1956 and thirty-six in 1957 to the peak of sixty-five concerts in 1958. His pill-popping kept pace with his gruelling schedule throughout, as did his panic attacks, concert cancellations, complaints about playing conditions, and general distaste for being a tourist. “You begin to feel your age,” he told an interviewer. He was only twenty-six years old at the time.

What got him through the night, so to speak, was imagining broadcasting potential and media. This was not a particularly long leap of the imagination in Toronto at the time, what with word spreading rapidly about Marshall McLuhan’s communication seminars at the University of Toronto, which were to lead to the formation of the Centre for Culture and Technology in 1963. By then McLuhan seemed to be everywhere. His book The Mechanical Bride, which appeared in 1951, explored the emergence of new cultural industries like advertising designed “to get inside the collective public mind.” Edmund Carpenter and Harold Innis were, along with McLuhan, the emerging generation of media-mavens centred on the journal Explorations, which went a long way to put the U of T and Toronto itself on the international map. “The intellectual excitement of endless dialogue between McLuhan and Carpenter had crystallized into a tangible project with their success in obtaining a grant from the Ford Foundation,” writes Canadian historian W. Terrence Gordon in Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding: A Biography. It was the foundation’s first investment in Canadian culture, U of T president Sidney Smith told McLuhan in a letter.

With Yehudi Menuhin rehearsing for Duo, 1966 CBC TV special.

Indeed. It was an extraordinarily heady time in Toronto, with a flourishing literary scene, artistic collectives such as Painters Eleven, and a flood of new composers in from Europe, such as Oskar Morawetz, putting Canadian composition “at the cross-roads,” as Gould recognized at the time. The possibility of being part of such an overlay of media and art production, of controlling it to some degree, of being controlled by it, or a bit of both — and maybe the buzz that comes with the hair-raising sexiness of it all — contributes to the sense of pleasure exuded by most of Gould’s TV appearances.

April 13, 1956: Opening Video

GRAPHIC: People of the moment against the background of their lives

Joe McCulley: And now, another guest with decided views. A pianist … Glenn Gould, who, at the age of fourteen, made a solo appearance with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Now twenty-three, he’s just received international acclaim on the release of a single recording … Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Many critics have referred to him as the most astonishing and promising young pianist on the continent.

MUSIC ENDS

McCulley: Good evening, Glenn.

Gould: Good evening, Mr. McCulley.

McCulley: What were you playing just now?

Gould: [Tells him and explains that he’s rehearsing it for a new recording in New York.]

McCulley: Glenn, in the last few months you’ve received a lot of attention in Life magazine and various other publications. What are your comments about all this publicity?

Gould: [Replies that he finds it flattering; also that he is glad to say he was first noticed in his own country. Mentions the overplaying of his eccentricities by the press.]

McCulley: What eccentricities, Glenn?

Gould: [Mentions his need to stay warm and his precautions against cold studios.]

McCulley: Following the success of the Goldberg Variations recordings, what have you done apart from your concert work?

Gould: [Replies he has written a quartet to be performed at Stratford, his future as a composer, etc.]

Gould never looked happier than in the interviews he gave CBC producer Franz Kraemer in 1959 for Glenn Gould: Off the Record and Glenn Gould: On the Record. The settings for each were to his liking, particularly his family’s Uptergrove cottage, with his beloved Chickering piano close at hand, which allowed him to turn around dramatically and play a sparkling atonal passage to prove a point. The many water and landscape shots in the cottage sequences are used to underline Gould’s need to get away. But this was cottage country, with boats buzzing by and city executives rushing up on Friday afternoons for the first Scotch, neat. Gould was connected with the city as much as ever.